In The Critic, Dalrymple examines the case of a frenzied knife attack in Marseille and the language used to describe its aftermath, arguing that the French press’s use of the euphemism “neutralised” to describe the police killing of the attacker is a small but telling instance of the semantic dehumanisation favoured by totalitarian regimes.
Much as he was to be reprehended, this man was still a man. He was killed, not neutralised. We ought not to indulge in semantic dehumanisation of the kind that totalitarian regimes indulge in.